24 Hours of Great Glen Race Report
Loyal readers of my now-defunct blog will know that the 24 Hours of Great Glen is the sacred holiday around which the religion I am founding soon is based. I’ve literally been blogging about how great this race is for 17 years now. I’ve done it 12 times and ridden over 100 laps of the race course. So when I tell you that this year’s 24HoGG was the most epic Great Glen experience for me yet, that actually means something, goddammit.
Everyone on the BikeReg team from years past finally got too busy being adults, so I floated over to the B2C2 team for 2024, which is arguably where I belonged anyway, but also I’m pretty sure 24 hour racing with your boss is really good for job security, so I’m probably back on the BikeReg team any time Ross wants to get back in the game…
The team was Harry, Greg and Noel. Harry and Greg are “normal” bike racers who race a variety of bike disciplines including mountain bikes so they are not interesting, especially because sometimes they are faster than me. Meanwhile, Noel’s entire mountain bike racing career is doing Great Glen for the last 2 years, and it’s entirely possible over half his lifetime mountain bike hours have been logged on the Great Glen course. Last year Noel cracked so hard at night he did an 80 minute lap and then didn’t ride for 8 hours. Noel is a wildcard but he comes with all the stoke and unflappable demeanor you could ever want from a 24 hour teammate. Noel rules.
As is traditional, we had to pick someone to do the opening leg which includes the run, and we played the “how recently have you had to do the Great Glen run, and have you run since the end of last cross season?” game. Greg lost the game (Harry, guess you’re running next year) so he got to start 24 hours of bike racing with a 3 minute run in bike shoes while we told him he was running too fast because running is stupid and painful and doesn’t matter.
We were correct. He finished the run in the mid-30s but was up to 7th by the end of his first lap.
I got to ride the second lap which apparently is something I’ve never done in the other 11 times I’ve done this race, because holy crap the second lap is LONELY. It’s the only point in the entire 24 hours where the course doesn’t have 130ish teams/solo riders evenly distributed on it. It was weird and I didn’t like it. It turns out that the secret fuel to my stoke is lapping solo riders at twice their speed (should I admit that?) so I just rode hard by myself and it felt kind of like training and it’s well established I dislike training.
I did pass two teams (one with a mechanical so does that even count?) to move us up to 5th.
It was a trillion percent humidity so I went straight from tagging Harry to lying in the river until my core temperature returned to something reasonable. I have no idea why I am the only one in the river spot behind the maintenance garage after every lap but holy cow is it great.
Harry passed two more teams (!!!!) and beat my lap time by 5 seconds (🙁) which was pretty hype, sending Noel out for the 3rd bike race of his life in an overall podium position.
Of course one of the teams ahead of us was the duo team of Luke and Berk from B2C2 that we were camping with, but that’s ok, I’m sure with FOUR OF US turning laps we’ll eventually pull ahead of them, so yeah we’re basically in second right now.
So as mentioned, Noel is maybe not an expert mountain bike racer so putting him out in 3rd place was feeding him to the lions, but he hung on to keep us in 6th after one full rotation of the squad, and best of all his crank didn’t fall off despite him replacing the chainring roughly 2 hours before starting his lap.
Greg went out for lap 2, and now free of having to start with a run, set the team’s fastest lap of the day. I followed it up by NOT setting the team’s fastest lap of the day and realizing that maybe I liked Greg better when I could beat him on a mountain bike.
Harry turned his second lap and set a new hot lap time for us at 44:25, confirming that Noel is definitely my favorite teammate.
I started my 3rd lap at 7:10 PM and they were all like “hey you need lights for this lap” and I was like “you can make me take lights but you can’t make me turn them on cuz I’ll be back before sunset” and I was right, I was back at 7:57 with zero lumens emitted.
(Don’t do the math on that lap time, I was totally going as fast as Greg and Harry)
Then it was into full night laps.
Night laps rule because you think you’re going faster than you are. Obstacles keep popping up faster than you’re used to and your brain says “the only explanation for this is increased speed, not reduced visibility” because your brain is stupid. Oh and it’s cooler, which is great, but the humidity somehow increases to two trillion percent which is kind cool in its own way as long as you never want any item in your possession to ever be dry again.
The gang put down some solid night laps, with everyone sliding the normal 1–2 minutes back from their daytime lap times. We had settled into 5th overall, still behind Luke and Berk, but it was only a matter of time before they cracked, plus they were riding doubles while we rode singles, yup we’re gonna start catching up with them soon. Somehow they were in 2nd overall still.
I got to do my first night lap at 11:20pm and it was classic night lap euphoria, you’re riding a little slower, which makes you ride a little smoother, so you’re saving energy and feeling good and going still pretty fast, I checked my time at the midpoint and it was only about 60 seconds off a day lap, nice. Ripped the singletrack descent across the road, still feeling good, feeling smooth, man I love night laps. I come off the LAST TURN of the entire course… drop a gear on the gravel road, gonna finish this lap strong… look down at my computer to see the time and confirm that this was a pretty good lap… and I look back up just in time to see a wooden stake in the middle of the road clip my handlebar.
It might sound like that wooden stake was randomly placed there by a saboteur, but no, it was a whole line of wooden stakes and rope down the middle of the road dividing a two-way section, and I’d ridden that section 3 times without incident, I just apparently can’t ride in a straight line if I look at my computer when deep in the clutches of night. lap. vibes.
I got SHREDDED by the gravel. I have been trying to think of a time I’ve crashed harder on a mountain bike ever since and I’ve yet to come up with one. Grinding from ~16mph to a stop via embedding rocks in your skin is not fun. I would take a crash on pavement at that speed any day.
Luckily I was literally 100 yards from the end of the lap so I limped in, covered in dirt and blood, at basically my expected finish time. I told Harry that I had “just crashed so fuggin hard” as if that was useful information to him, and then staggered off to see what kind of medical attention was available at midnight of a 24 hour race.
Two nice firefighters from the Gorham FD scrubbed rocks and dirt out of me for a while and argued about whether or not the dark spot in my knee was a rock they should go in there to try to dig out, or “just” some internal bleeding. The senior one declared it not a rock, wrapped my elbow and knee up extensively, and told me about 500 times that I could try riding more but only if I “listened to my body.”
(I can’t believe they didn’t trust a bike racer 12 hours into a race to listen to their body)
If this was a solo event I would have dropped out immediately but there was no way I was going to bail on the team. The boys needed me — not to ride fast, but just to RIDE. So they could sleep. I couldn’t tell everyone that this idiot had just crashed himself out on a fixed object on doubletrack and thus they would be pulling an all nighter while I quit and went to bed, right?
I figured if I rode a minute slower per mile that would still only be 10 minutes slower per lap, so the reduction in leg pain would cancel out the increase in skin pain. Yeah I can totally do this. Harry and Noel, go to bed. Greg and whatever’s left of me will do the next 4 laps.
I sat around camp generally being dramatic to whoever wasn’t riding on the Luke/Berk team, but honestly even with a bunch of skin removed I was probably suffering less than a duo team in second overall, so it felt kind of lame.
At 2am I gingerly mounted my bike and rode back to the exchange area to see what I could contribute.
I noticed while pedaling over that actually… pedaling didn’t really hurt more than not pedaling. Like my brain had already filed knee and elbow away as “stuff that just always hurts” and was bored with it.
At the exchange I told Greg I felt surprisingly decent and maybe this lap wasn’t going to be 10 minutes slower than my other laps.
It ended up being…. 20 seconds slower. Granted it didn’t have a wood stake impalement attempt in it, but still. No one was on team slack at 3 AM but that didn’t stop me from freaking out about how good I felt.
Meanwhile Greg was maybe dying a slow death due to GI issues but that’s his story, not mine, that just gives me an extra few minutes between laps to scream into the 3am Slack void and shovel Honey Stinger waffles into my face.
My sixth lap was another totally decent lap even by not-injured standards so I was feeling GOOD at 4:30 am when I finished it and got to hand off to the Harry/Noel duo so I could sleep.
We were solidly in 5th overall, 3rd in the 4-man expert division, 20ish minutes ahead of the nearest competition (and surely Berk and Luke would slow down soon and we’ll move up a spot).
Trying to sleep was extra awful because there was exactly one position that I could lie in that didn’t put pressure on a wound. And then after an hour of sleep I woke up because I was so thirsty. So that was my night of sleep. Standard 24 hour race sleep, really. At least my farts were quiet.
The plus side of waking up early is lots of time to VIBE and EAT. The sun was up, the end was approaching, hell yeah man we’re gonna make it! Harry was out there continuing to best my lap times (booo) and Noel was out there hanging in there shockingly well for a man powered by cold canned soup and farts. Greg was basically dead from GI issues by now I think but he wasn’t complaining about it and/or I was ignoring his complaining. Either way I was hyped to throw down a daylight lap and go home in 5th overall.
Over at the exchange area there were a bunch of fast looking dudes milling about, including the overall leading team’s next rider. I made the mental note that I was probably gonna get smoked by him on my lap and not to let it bother me. Some guy I vaguely recognized from the 7th overall team made some comment about how he was coming after me, which I thought was funny because we were 20 minutes up on them when I went to sleep and he was at the transition area waaaaaay too early for someone going out 20 minutes after me.
A third of the way into the lap, someone flies up behind me, but no worries, it’s the first place team lapping us so I just move over and let him by.
WAIT.
It’s the 7th place guy from the tent.
He’s not in 7th and he’s not 20 minutes down and he just took our 5th place and I understand what he was talking about now and did you know the race situation can change while you’re sleeping?
He is also better at pedaling bikes than me (just like every blog villain, ever) so after 5 minutes of desperately trying to pretend I’m able to hold the draft on doubletrack I have to give up and ride my own pace for the rest of the lap.
Luckily the lap ends with a bunch of things that aren’t just pedaling hard so the damage is somewhat mitigated. I tag Harry just 22 seconds back at 10:01 AM and the race for the last spot on the expert team podium is ON.
I no longer hate Harry for being faster than me. He turns at 46:11 lap and takes ~3 minutes on their guy and we’re back on the podium.
Noel goes out at 10:48 AM with 3 minutes to spare. But Noel’s been losing 4–5 minutes vs their team every lap. We start trying to make a plan. Harry’s our fastest guy, he’s not next in the rotation but he’s our best chance to win even though he’s only gonna be on 45 minutes recovery — Greg’s stomach has basically exploded and I am becoming increasingly interested in heading to an urgent care instead of the start line. Are they going to change their rotation to send their best guy out for the final lap? How long do we wait before not even sending Harry out on the chase? We could just finish at a nice round 7 laps each, finish at 11:50, and start packing up, guys. It’s fine. Who cares if we beat them.
Harry cares. Well, he cares enough to put a new kit on and start eating.
We all go over together to the exchange area at 11:35 to see how much of a gap Harry would have to make up, IF he were to ride.
NOEL TURNS HIS FASTEST LAP OF THE RACE AND COMES IN STILL AHEAD.
They tag just 30 seconds behind us after 23 hours and 40 minutes of racing and their best guy (who had just taken my lunch money an hour prior) goes out in hot pursuit.
I retract my previous statements about not caring.
Fifteen minutes into the lap Harry is calling for support via speech-to-text on his phone like it’s the Tour.
At the flyover (2/3rds of the way through the lap) I give him a bottle of ice water straight from my cooler. He still has almost a thirty second lead. He’s doing it! We’re doing it!
The team assembles at the finish. The other team is there too. All six of us agree this is awesome and we’re so glad we only have to watch it instead of drown ourselves in lactic acid for bragging rights after 24 hours of bike racing.
For fifteen minutes we stand there getting more and more tense, waiting to see who will come into view first and making jokes about how there’s no clear finish line, so what happens, they just sprint full blast into the timing tent and the first guy who hits the table wins???
Rider after rider finishes happily, casually, high fiving their teammates and taking photos because in a 24 hour race, gaps are measured in minutes if not hours and you really don’t need to make every second count.
…except when you do.
Finally a rider comes into view in full sprint.
It’s not Harry.
We lose.
But my mind has changed again. I don’t care that we lost, because we tried as hard as we could try and it was fucking awesome and 12 hours ago I thought I had let the whole team down and now I’m running cold bottles to the flyover at noon Sunday at Great Glen and it feels like it matters and damn isn’t that the real reason we do this stuff???
But also, if I don’t hit that stake, I finish the lap a minute earlier, and Harry holds him off. So I’m just saying… look out next year, “Seeking Ice Cream Sponsor.”
Lost in the end of race drama was the fact that we never caught Luke and Berk, they finished third overall, maybe the best performance of a two-person team in the event’s 20+ year history, it was completely bonkers. They are bad, bad men.
